


Hey Arizona (what color is the sunset?)

by 1000ft



Series: hey arizona [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 18:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12990168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000ft/pseuds/1000ft
Summary: This is your color: red of blood and week old bruises that won't fade. The motor oil stench of your anger that you can't escape.





	Hey Arizona (what color is the sunset?)

The desert is a dead thing.

 

Keith knows, has always known; the desert is a haven of decay and erosion. It's the grind of sand and dirt and sunbaked shrubs that crumble in his fingers. That dust-heavy air that makes his skin feel paper-dry.

 

It hadn't always (his life) steeped in sepia rocks. Keith remembers the burnt orange of fall and the saturated cerulean blues of summer skies. There's a soft, age-worn memory he keeps in the back of his mind, the way he'd keep photographs tucked in shoe boxes under his bed, if he had photographs at all, that smells of black tea with too much sugar, the sway of sunlight through towering, towering oak trees. 

 

He'd missed color. He'd missed vibrancy. And the irony - when he thinks about it here, now, in a castle light-years away from the silhouette of Arizona mountains -that he would be the red paladin, in a team of color-coded galactic pilots...it does not escape him. 

 

You want color back? the universe taunts. Here it is. This is your color: red of blood and week old bruises that won't fade. The motor oil stench of your anger that you can't escape. Red like the flush of shameconfusionfearadrenaline that blurs dreams and hard-won - hard- _lost_ \- battles. 

 

Here's the color of your sunset. The universe sounds like the inner machinery of an alien war ship; is it laughing, is it a battle march? Is it him laughing. Is it his battle march. 

 

Keith is reminded of desert sunsets. Red and marigold and heat that burnsburnsburns. _Yes_ , the universe says, you were meant to burn with it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Posted a while ago but taken down, so if it sounds familiar, that's why :O  
> Thanks for reading!


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